Vols, Prof. Michel

Michel Vols

Michel Vols (The Hague, 1984) is Chair in Public Order Law at the Faculty of Law. He graduated from the Faculties of Law and Philosophy at the University of Groningen. He graduated cum laude from the Faculty of Law in 2008, having completed a Research Master’s in Functionality of Law. During the programme, he specialized in public order law and the enforcement of administrative law by local authorities. Vols was awarded a PhD in 2013 for a thesis entitled ‘Woonoverlast en het recht op privéleven. De aanpak van overlastveroorzakers in Nederland, Engeland, Wales en België’ [Housing-related Anti-social Behaviour and the Right to a Private Life. Combating Anti-social Behaviour in the Netherlands, England, Wales and Belgium]. For this research, he examined legal practice and legislation in England, Wales, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Nowadays, Vols is an assistant professor and also works as an academic researcher in the area of public order law at the Centre for Public Order and Public Security, which is linked to the University of Groningen. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Ghent (Belgium), the University of Bristol (UK), the University of Puerto Rico (USA), Cape Town (South Africa) and founded the International Research Network on Law and Anti-social behaviour. In addition, he conducts research for the Ministry of Interior and Kingdom Relations on combating anti-social behaviour. He also gives training sessions for the Dutch Centre for Crime Prevention and Safety on dealing with anti-social behaviour, urban degradation and rogue landlords.

In 2016 Vols has been awarded the Nicolaas Muleriusstipendium for his research. In 2019 he launched a website where citizens can get free legal advice if their neighbours are causing a nuisance: overlastadvies.nl.

Medvedeva,
M., Vols, M., & Wieling, M.
(2018). Judicial decisions of the European Court of Human
Rights: looking into the crystall ball. In Proceedings
of the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies in Europe
2018

van
Tongeren, S., & Vols, M. (2017). The
Right to Housing and the Right to a Second Chance: How Dutch
Landlords and Local Authorities Facilitate and Frustrate the
Successful Reintegration of Ex-Offenders. In M. Vols, &
J. Sidoli (Eds.), People and Buildings: Comparative Housing
Law (pp. 171-190). (Studies in housing law; Vol. 2). The
Hague: Eleven International Publishing.

Fick,
S., & Vols, M. (2016). Best protection
against eviction? A Comparative Analysis of Protection against
Evictions in the European Convention on Human Rights and the South
African Constitution. European Journal of
Comparative Law and Governance, 3(1), 40-69.
https://doi.org/10.1163/22134514-00301002

Cramer,
R., & Vols, M. (2016). Hoarding disorder and
the legal system: a comparative analysis of South African and Dutch
law. International Journal for Law and
Psychiatry, 49, Part A, 114-123. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijlp.2016.08.004

Vols,
M., Tassenaar, P., & Jacobs,
J. (2015). Anti-social behaviour and European
protection against eviction: An analysis of Dutch case law based on
statistics. International Journal of Law in the
Built Environment, 7(2), 148-161. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJLBE-08-2014-0021